Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: The Church – Reptile

An encounter in an abandoned dinosaur statue park leads Noah to an inescapable conclusion after recent events have turned humanity’s perception of the world on its head.

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Noah centered the tyrannosaurus rex in the viewport of his camera and snapped a photo. The dinosaur rose out of a tangle of brambles, surrounded by trees that hadn’t been cut back in some time. Leaning forward, it loomed over what remained of the path but it was too upright for any modern depiction. A tripod, supported by two thick legs and a fat tail that dragged on the ground behind it. Its once blood red paint had been washed away to a pale pink except for streaks where it was protected from the rain. Graffiti tags squiggled their way up the length of the statue. It looked like the taggers had a contest to see who could get their tag painted the highest. One scarred the side of the t.rex’s face where its left eye should have been. Conical teeth lined the inside of the statue’s mouth. A pair of someone’s old, dirty sneakers dangled from its lower jaw by their laces.

Noah moved around the dinosaur, taking shots from several angles. The pathways that circled the park were still easy to discern. Although carpeted in a couple of inches of leaf litter, the paths had been lined with herringbone patterns of brick. Trees overgrew it in places, creating woodland tunnels. To gain access to the abandoned tourist attraction, Noah had to squeeze through a gap between the gates at the edge of a parking lot beside the highway. Barbed wire covered the top of the fences around the place, fat with tetanus. Then, he’d pushed his way through the woods until he found the statues and paths.

Continuing on, Noah found a headless sauropod, its body the size of a caravan. A plaque buried in weeds called it a brontosaurus, which he was pretty sure wasn’t a thing anymore. Its long neck and comparatively tiny head had snapped off and lay in several sections in the overgrown grass. Rebar rusted in the stump. Its body was fat, round, almost obese, propped up on four tree trunk legs with its tail dragging on the ground behind it. Noah took some more photos then moved on to an equally overweight stegosaurus in even worse condition. Most of its plates and the spikes on its thagomizer had snapped off, and a broken section in its side showed ribs of flaking rebar. He took some shots close up of the damage, fixated on details rather than the whole. He had to work fast to take all the photos he wanted before the light died on him. Right now was the golden hour, the light soft and malleable, but the sun was sinking quickly in the west.

While the designs for the dinosaur statues were old there seemed to be an element of judgement to them as well. Fat, indolent, lazy creatures, bodies too heavy for their limbs to support, tails too heavy to pick up off the ground. No wonder they had gone extinct, as obese and stupid and slow as they were. Doubly extinct, these examples. First they’d gone extinct as living animals and then these depictions had been demolished by scientific evidence. Ironically, it was probably those oversized bodies and limbs that had allowed the statues to survive to some degree the predations of weather and time in the years since the park closed.

“Rulers of the world, once,” a voice said behind him.

Noah twisted, nearly losing his footing. A man stood on the overgrown path behind him, a little shy but faintly amused at Noah’s surprise. Noah clutched his camera like a weapon. The man looked homeless, like he’d been living rough for months without a bed or a hot shower. His face was grimy and covered by a ratty beard. His age was difficult to tell, older than Noah but not old. He dressed in layers, too many t-shirts and sweaters for the mild weather under a filthy coat, torn tracksuit pants over dirty jeans, a woolen cap, and mismatched sneakers.

“What?”

“They ruled the world once, the dinosaurs,” the homeless man said. “For millions of years, much longer than human beings have been around. Look what’s left of them now.”

“Yeah, sure, you’re right,” Noah said.

“You know you’re not supposed to be here, right?”

“I mean, I guess if I’m not then neither are you.”

The hobo smiled and Noah saw a flash of teeth that looked too white and even in the middle of that dirty face. “Are you from around here?”

“Actually I’m in town for my cousin’s wedding. I’d been here, the park, when I was a kid. I heard it shut down a few years ago but I thought it would be, well, good for some photos.”

Noah’s hand strayed to the side pocket of his satchel. Inside was a can of bear spray, essentially high powered mace. Perfectly legal to carry although Noah suspected there wasn’t a bear within a thousand miles of where they were standing. The hobo with the white, straight teeth didn’t seem to notice.

“Taking photos for some special purpose? Are you a reporter?”

“No, it’s just a hobby,” Noah said.

“What do they call that? Urban exploration?”

“That’s it.”

“You do that often?”

“Sometimes. It’s not the only thing I take photos of.”

“I’ve got a really nice tableau back here if you’d like to see it?”

Noah raised his eyebrows at the use of the word ‘tableau’. The hobo gestured deeper into the abandoned park. After a moment of hesitation, Noah followed, curious. His fingertips brushed the can of bear mace.

“My name is Noah, by the way,” he introduced himself.

“Oh, uh, Barney,” the homeless man said.

“Barney?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve been camping out here, Barney? It’s a long way out of town.”

“Well, I’ve had a bit of a problem with people lately.”

Barney led Noah deeper, through another tunnel of trees to a space where the sky opened up. The light was dying. In the centre of the clearing were two statues, an ankylosaurus facing off against a predatory dinosaur, an allosaurus maybe. The ankylosaurus, like a great, waddling turtle covered in spikes and with a tail ending in a sledgehammer club, was still in pretty good condition. Its orange paint had mostly washed away, leaving its naked concrete a pale colour with darker streaks on its legs. The allosaurus or whatever it was meant to be was in much worse condition, clawed apart by frost and weather making its way into imperfections over time. Chunks of concrete littered the long grass all around a kind of rock face backdrop, revealing a great deal of the statue’s rebar skeleton. Barney displayed it with open arms.

“Very nice,” Noah said.

Noah circled, snapping more photos from different angles. He didn’t peer through his viewfinder, however, and he didn’t turn his back on Barney. He kept one eye on the man at all times. Barney kept his distance though, not crowding Noah while it was just the two of them.

“Think of it, if it wasn’t for a single rock falling from outer space the world would look like a very different place now. For hundreds of millions of years, they ruled. It was the asteroid and the giant freeze that allowed mammals to evolve free from under the great lizards’ claws. No mammals, no humans, yes, the world would look like a very different place indeed.”

Noah finished and hung the camera’s strap around his neck. He might have continued but Barney’s presence made that difficult and the light was dying anyway. Barney hovered for a few more moments.

“Perhaps you’d like to join me for a drink?” Barney said.

“I thought you didn’t like people?” Noah replied.

Barney flashed his too-exacting grin. “I didn’t say I didn’t like them, just that we’d had some problems lately. Them and I. And I haven’t had any company, any good conversation, for quite a while.”

Barney led Noah toward a fake cave inset in the wall at the back of the display. A tarp had been hooked across the entrance, presumably to disguise it and to make it more suitable as a home. Barney pulled it aside. Inside, Noah could see some sort of makeshift camp. A sleeping bag and blankets. What looked like a camping stove, piles of clothing and cartons of food. Noah stopped short of going inside.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Noah said.

“One of whom?” Barney’s face betrayed no expression but his features went very still.

“You know what I mean, one of them.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, friend.”

“Reptilian. You’re a reptile.”

Eighteen months earlier, the existence of reptilians was exposed to the world. A foreign species of intelligent humanoids, previously known only as fodder for conspiracy nuts. Puppet masters who disguised themselves as human beings. It started with a college student who’d been interning for a state senator. One night they’d returned to the senator’s office to retrieve something they’d forgotten and found the senator choking down several live mice. Their instinct had been to take out their phone and begin recording. As part of their internship, they’d been given access to the senator’s social media accounts and, on impulse, they started live streaming. They managed to stay hidden and record for almost twenty minutes. By the time the stream ended, it was being watched by several hundred thousand people.

The stream was taken down only minutes later. It had been copied, however, and would be watched by tens of millions more over the following days. So-called experts and an army of online bots dismissed the video as obviously the product of AI. The senator himself appeared on a late night talk show joking about the incident. The college student who’d taken the video disappeared. Some claimed it was due to foul play but mostly it was assumed they were overwhelmed by the attention the video received and were lying low. While the incident spawned a lot more interest in the previously unremarkable senator, a heap of conspiracy theories, and a greater conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence on politics and public trust, the news cycle and attention span of the masses quickly moved on.

Waiting, however, another group saw the incident as their opportunity to strike. Those who’d been vocal about the existence of reptilians were dismissed as conspiracy theorist nutcases. And truthfully, many of them were. Crazies who had gotten a whiff of something and spun their own elaborate persecution fantasies wholesale out of other people’s fictions and groupthink. Many conspiracies had even been created by the reptilians themselves to make anybody with real information look just as crazy as the rest of them. But there were others who had been quietly watching and taking notes, preparing, for years and years in silence.

Another livestream reignited things by showcasing the murder of a billionaire tech investor, infamous for bankrolling the campaigns of largely unsuccessful far-right candidates. The murder, broadcast to millions, was shocking enough. But what was much more alarming was when his masked killers cut and peeled off their victim’s face to reveal a green, scaly, second face hidden beneath a layer of latex skin. They proved the victim was also wearing some kind of fake teeth and coloured contact lenses. It was followed, only days later, by the assassination of a congresswoman widely known for lending her voice to every fashionable leftist cause. The murder happened during a press conference. Feeds from mainstream outlets cut away but footage provided to independent sources from several different angles proved that whatever leaked out of the congresswoman’s gunshot wounds was not human blood. Several more assassinations followed, either livestreamed or recorded, all of them accompanied by evidence that the victims weren’t human but were in fact reptilian humanoids wearing masks and suits made from impossibly refined artificial skin.

World governments, military, law enforcement and media pushed back but demands for answers and investigations gained unstoppable momentum. And while the higher ups in many of these organisations appeared to be compromised, the majority of grunts were entirely human and increasingly suspicious. Public trials were arranged, coups, mutinies. A lot more killings took place, many of them mistakenly taking out individuals who were ultimately proven human, but soon a sense of order began to assert itself. Noninvasive tests were developed and participation for all political figures, celebrities, CEOs and other public figures was made mandatory.

Reptilians, as they become widely known, were found embedded at all levels of human society. Their numbers were astonishing. A large minority of politicians of every stripe in practically every government. Often the less prominent members of their parties, not the recognisable faces but the backbones, the quiet decision makers, the determining votes. Lobbyists and political donors. CEOs and bankers and many of the rich and powerful. The vast majority of actors and musicians turned out to be human but many of those behind the scenes, producers, managers, agents, were exposed as reptilians. Generals, police chiefs, editors, commentators, one by one they were exposed. Some governments began to execute the deceptive creatures on sight. Others arrested and detained them in prison camps until they could decide on a permanent solution. Naturally, a lot of reptilians fled and disappeared before they could be killed or captured by the angry hordes of humans turning up on their doorstops.

For everyone else, life went on. Finding out that human beings shared their planet with a second intelligent species was shocking enough. Doubly so that they’d been disguised as people, rich and famous and influential people in many cases. And they’d been manipulating mankind since the beginning of recorded history, or even sooner. But life went on. People had to get up in the morning and go to work. They had to pay the rent and bills, and buy groceries. There were births and deaths and first dates and weddings and sports and bingeable TV shows. Life went on for most of mankind. Gaps left by the reptilians were filled. Witch hunts continued for those who might have escaped suspicion thus far while others fled.

That, presumably, was where the reptilian calling itself Barney had come from. It had fled from whatever life it previously occupied and was hiding here, in this abandoned park where nobody came except urban explorers like Noah.

To Barney’s credit, he didn’t try to bluff Noah once discovered. His too-white, too-wide grin stayed frozen on his face for several long moments before falling.

“What gave it away?” Barney asked.

“Your teeth, firstly. They’re too white and straight, they don’t match the rest of your look,” Noah said. “They could be crowns, you could just be a rich guy fallen on hard times, or they could be capped over your real fangs.”

“Anything else?”

“The beard looks patchy. Since your skin suits don’t grow real hair, I’m guessing you had to glue it on before you went on the run to make yourself less recognisable. Your face and hands are dirty but not really, I don’t know, weathered, run down, like someone who has been living rough. Under the dirt, the skin looks too healthy. And you’re wearing too many layers of clothes for the cold. You could get away with that, I guess, a lot of homeless dress in layers, but I know you reptiles like to be warm.”

Barney looked impressed. Noah wondered how genuine the emotion was. Whether the lizards practised and practised showing emotions on their human faces until it became second nature or if he was making a conscious effort.

“Very good, are you some kind of police officer? Or maybe a hunter of my kind?”

Noah shrugged. “Just got a good eye, I guess.”

“Why did you follow me then?” Barney asked. “Why didn’t you run screaming to the nearest human authorities?”

“I was curious,” Noah said. “There’s so much information about you guys out there but a lot of it is obvious bullshit. The government must be interrogating some of you but they’re keeping all the answers pretty close to their chests. A lot of people are angry, saying we have a right to know, but they’re claiming secrecy is important until you’re all rooted out.”

“So you wanted to ask me some questions?”

“I guess so, I’ve never met one of your kind. Not that I know about anyway.”

Barney remained at the entrance to his cave, holding the tarp aside. He gestured at Noah to join him. Light was fading from the sky but Noah didn’t move one way or the other.

“I think I’ll stay here, thanks,” Noah said.

“So you had some questions?”

“How many of you are there?”

Barney thought it over for a moment. “More than you’d think, many less now.”

“Are you aliens or-, something else?”

“Demons?” Barney smirked.

“Well, like I said, there’s a lot of bullshit out there.”

“We evolved on this planet the same as you did. Long before you did.”

Noah nodded at the ankylosaurus and the other dinosaur statue. “You evolved out of them, didn’t you?”

“Not them precisely, but yes. My species’ civilisation was in its infancy when the asteroid fell. We almost died out. It took my ancestors many generations and hundreds of years of hibernation to adjust to the changing climate.”

“Is that why you’re staying here? To remember your ancestors and think about what might have been if that asteroid hadn’t dropped?”

“It was a hidden place, abandoned.” Barney shrugged, almost mimicking Noah. “But I suppose you might be right.”

“You can take off that disguise.”

Barney didn’t seem to know if that was a suggestion or an order. The two of them were at a strange stalemate. Noah was all alone but if he alerted the authorities that Barney was here then the reptilian would surely be killed or taken. Reaching into his mouth, he detached the rows of too-white teeth, revealing, instead, dozens of identical fangs, slightly yellow, small but sharp. His jaw clicked and opened much wider than it had before, giving his features an uncanny tilt. Removing a plastic case from his coat, he stored the fake teeth inside it. He reached for his eyes and did the same with some kind of oversized contact lenses. The eyes beneath them were bright red with strangely shaped pupils.

“I’ll leave the skin on, if that’s alright?” Barney said with a hint of a new lisp. “It takes longer than you’d think to get it on and off. Mostly we wear it for days, even weeks, without changing.”

“Why do you disguise yourselves to look like us?”

“When my ancestors first started to encounter yours, there were bloody clashes between the two races. We were, at the time, smarter, more advanced. We were stronger, faster. We lived longer, but we breed much, much slower. And you were so much more vicious than us, crueller. We are also far more individualistic than your kind. Kill one of us, well, that wasn’t a good reason for the rest of us to risk our own necks. But kill one of yours, and your tribes would slaughter every one of us you could get your hands on.”

“You talk about it like you were there.”

Barney laughed a hissing laugh. “No, of course not. I’m talking about ancient stories here! My ancestors, a thousand generations ago. We’re longer lived than your kind but we’re not immortals.”

“So, when did you start to disguise yourselves?”

“When the ancestors first attempted to disguise themselves and infiltrate human tribes, they were easily discovered. We then tried to hide and avoid human beings for many generations. By the time we came back into contact with you, there were too many of you for us to continue hiding. But our techniques had improved and we were much more successful at blending into your societies and embedding ourselves.”

“Manipulating us, treating us like puppets,” Noah said.

“The better to keep you from discovering us. To keep you from uniting against us and trying to eliminate us once again.”

“See how that worked out for you.”

Barney grinned, too wide, full of sharp teeth, eyes burning. “My kind has nearly been wiped out before. We survive, in secret, in hiding. Our memories are long and we see much further into the future. Every day, Earth’s climate becomes more inhospitable to you and more appealing to us. We may have manipulated you into any number of conflicts but as resources dwindle then your own warlike nature will assert itself again. And who knows? We may even have allies among your kind still, you can’t be sure. Given time, you might find us pulling your strings again.”

“Is that right?” Noah said slowly.

“That’s right. Did you have any other questions?” Barney asked.

“Do you really drink the blood of babies?”

“That’s libellous.”

“Who were you before all this happened?”

Barney shook his head. “No one special. A lobbyist, I lived in Washington, you would have never heard of me but you’d have known my work. But I had a wife, you know? One of us, and two children, human, adopted. Now, my wife is dead and my children think I’m a monster.”

Noah felt a pang of sympathy but he didn’t let his guard drop. He looked up. The sky was bruising in the east as sunlight died in its western half. At this rate, he’d be lucky to get back to the parking lot and his car before it got dark. He didn’t want to be stumbling around after sunset, especially with the reptilian behind him.

“I’ve answered your questions, what now?” Barney asked. “We go our separate ways?”

“If you let me leave, I won’t call the police and tell them you’re here.” Noah said. “We can pretend this never happened.”

“I wish I could believe that. But, living as we have, trust can be a difficult thing.”

With superhuman speed, Barney exploded forward. If Noah had been any less than one hundred percent ready to act, he’d have been tackled to the ground. He ripped the bear mace out of the side pocket of his bag. A black can with a trigger mechanism on the side that made it resemble a grenade. Sidestepping, he released a jet of peppery liquid into the reptilian’s face.

Barney tripped and sprawled, and started to scream. Fingers knotted into claws and raked at his eyes. A burning haze wafted around the reptilian and forced Noah to back off a few steps. Liquid mace dribbled from the nozzle of the can. Erupting from his fanged maw, Barney’s screams took on an inhuman edge. He clawed at his face so badly that the mask began to peel away in curling strips to reveal slick green scales, like snakeskin, underneath.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Barney hissed. “I didn’t mean it! I just wanted to scare you!”

“Why did you even talk to me? You could have stayed hidden, could have avoided any trouble by just not talking to me.”

“I was lonely! I haven’t had anyone to talk to!”

“I thought you were all more individualistic than us? I think you wanted to test yourself, you miss fooling us like you used to. Or you miss fresh meat.”

“It wasn’t like that! I’m sorry!”

Noah looked around at their surroundings. Bits of the allosaurus statue littered the grass. Uneven chunks of concrete. He picked one up and weighed it in his fist. If it hadn’t been for a simple rock falling from space, the world would look like a very different place. Human beings would have never gotten the chance to evolve from mammals darting around under the feet of monstrous predators.

“Please!” Barney begged.

Noah hefted the chunk of concrete and brought it down like a hammer. The blow splintered the creature’s skull. The reptilians and their allies weren’t predators, they were parasites. Hoarders, polluters, liars, puppet masters. But without them, maybe the human race would evolve again into something better.

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Sean: Reptilians, real or fake? If I disappear or wind up dead, maybe that’s because I got too close to the truth with this one!

There’s something to be said for a protagonist that is quietly competent, and demonstrates that through their actions rather than something that’s informed by their backstory. That’s what I was going for here and I hope it comes across. Not a big fan of the trope where a character is ex-military, or a cop, or something like that, as a shorthand for them being competent in emergencies or whatever. Kind of the equivalent of a female character who demonstrates some expertise or skill because that’s what their father did. Having a shorthand isn’t always bad but it can feel lazy, I think.

Might try to post a non-Mixtape story or two before the next addition, Echo Beach is a pretty long one I think. I don’t know, we’ll see.

Next Track: Martha and the Muffins – Echo Beach